p2pnet.net Opinion:- The Internet, and downloading, are here to stay … Anyone who thinks otherwise should prepare themselves to end up on the slagheap of history - Janis Ian

Janis Ian hit the road running in the mid-60s with Society’s Child. And she hasn’t stopped since.

She’s a star by any definition but, unlike so many of her famous brothers and sisters, her vision of what the Net means to music generally and to performers in particular isn’t clouded by Big Music and its bottom line-inspired rhetoric. She doesn’t say she’s starving to death because of downloads, and nor is she calling for people who download music to be thrown into jail.

In fact, “I’m a recording artist who has sold multiple platinum records since the 1960s,” she said a couple of years back. “My site, janisian.com, began offering free downloads in July. About a thousand people per day have downloaded my music, most of them people who had never heard of me and never bought my CDs.”

Ex-RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) truth realignment specialist Hilary Rosen accused Ian of “Misinformation and Mischaracterizations” following Ian’s The Internet Debacle – an alternative view.

This resulted in FALLOUT – a follow up. And then Ian did it again a column in USA Today saying the RIAA’s claim that the industry and artists are hurt by free downloading, “is nonsense.”

Also have a look at this Q&A in /. here.

Ian has since written another piece which kicks off, “Ethics in the music industry… I can hear you laughing already.”

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>

Ethics In The Music Industry
By Janis Ian – Performing Songwriter

“Ethics in the music industry…” Now, there’s an interesting topic… I can hear you laughing already. Pretty funny, the idea of our industry having ethics. Everyone knows that in the entertainment business, ethics come in a distant third, behind success and greed. We revel in the public’s image of us as cutthroats, and we snicker at the thought that we, of all industries, need a moral compass.

When did we become such a laughingstock? and when did it become a point of pride?

I grew up in this industry. I published my first song when I was twelve, made my first record at fourteen, had my first hit at fifteen. I love being a part of this industry.

Of course, back then, it wasn’t called “the music industry”. It was called “the music business”. We all knew there was a vast difference between an industry, and a business. Anyone can start a business. It takes a large corporation to start an industry.

The very word “industry” comes from the Middle English word “industrie”, or skill, and from the Latin “industria”, or diligence. Webster’s defines it as: “a department or branch of a craft, art, business, or manufacture; especially : one that employs a large personnel and capital especially in manufacturing.”

So the very word “industry” implies disconnection; a body to large for its separate members to know one another.

Conversely, the word “business” comes to us from the Middle Ages, where it was simply “busy-ness”, meaning engaged in occupation, bustling, full of activity. You can have no staff other than yourself, and still call yourself a business.

It does strike me that perhaps a return to calling ourselves a “business”, one concentrated on activity and occupation, might serve us better than thinking of ourselves as a giant conglomerate.

Let’s start with this assumption – we are a baby industry. One might argue that being an artist is the second oldest profession in the world – and placing it right next to the first oldest profession in the world might go a long way toward explaining why we’re so poorly thought of… but in truth, our business is a young business compared to models like home building, or book production. Even the automotive industry is older, as a formalized industry, than ours.

As a baby industry, one which from the first has existed very much in the public eye, we’ve gone through our growing pains in a fishbowl. And the public eye, while it serves our purpose by inviting new listeners in and branding our trade names and logos on their brains, also enjoys gossip. All press is good press, or so we’ve always said.

We started on the docks, on the streets, in the fields, finding young talent and bringing it to the public. We got our first million seller from Bessie Smith, who like Ma Rainey had worked in a brothel before becoming a recording artist. Not the most pristeen of beginnings.

During the 50’s, we got hit with the payola scandals. People who thought the music they heard on radio was played simply because it was the best music available had a rude awakening, and they didn’t like it. At the same time, stories began surfacing of our connection with the mob. Kickbacks, threats, bodily harm – to the average newspaper reader, the music business was a schizophrenic combination of clean-cut, starry-eyed young singers, and Tony Soprano-like concrete manufacturers. People who’d thought their idols were tidy do-gooders suddenly saw the roaches under the carpet.

We cleaned up our act, or rather, federal and state legislatures forced us to clean up our act. We went underground with pay-offs. By the 60’s, everything looked pretty good. And life in the music business when I started out was good. Things were simple. If you were lucky enough to fall into the right connections, and you did what they told you to do – and you had the song to back it up – you had a hit. You had a hit because hits were, in large part, bought. No mystery to it. Drop the keys to a new Cadillac on a program director’s desk and tell him his car’s back from the carwash, and oh by the way, there’s this single we’d really like to get aired. Send your fellows around to the neighborhood bars and make sure that single’s on every jukebox. Get a DJ to do a record hop, pay him for his time through your production company, make sure there’s a hundred screaming kids there, all of whom are paid in cash or beer, then get the artist to put in a live performance to promote the whole thing – for free, of course. Some things never change.

Life was a lot easier when the Mafia ran the music business. You knew where you stood. There were rules, and if you followed them, you would succeed. I was taught these at the beginning of my career:

Rule number 1: Don’t shit where you eat. Don’t make program directors, DJ’s, record company executives angry with you. It’ll cost you.
Rule number 2: : It’s a small business. The people you meet going up are the same ones you’ll meet coming down.
Rule number 3: Don’t expect a long ride. At that time, Lloyd’s of London estimated a singer’s career at seven years, from start to finish.
Rule number 4: The show must go on. The only excuses for failure to appear are death, or hospitalization.
Rule number 5: There are no rules, and you break them at your peril.

The rules haven’t changed much, have they?

During the 70’s, our business transformed. The mob moved out, seeking greener pastures in the West. The business school graduates began moving in. When I signed my first recording contract in 1965, most of the people on the business end were ex-musicians. Every company executive I met could play an instrument; Goddard Lieberson, who pretty much built CBS Records (now Sony), could notate. The people employed at music-related companies socialized with their artists, knew their artists. You didn’t have the huge wall that began to separate us in the late ’60’s, when artists began demanding more control over areas business people thought were their traditional right – choice of song, choice of producer, choice of career direction.

During the ’70’s, the gulf between the music “business” people and artists began to widen, and the large influx of demographic-worshippers who moved in widened it beyond repair. Up until then, we’d at least been able to talk to executives about our work. And even if they didn’t understand, or didn’t care, they paid polite attention and tried to understand, because we were in it for the long run together.

My first hit, Society’s Child, was released three times. I’m not talking about being shoved out there in the hope that something would stick. I’m talking about a full release, with full promotional budget and support. It took over eighteen months for that record to become a hit. Were they right to spend the money and time? Well, it was a hit record in 1966… and Polygram are still making money off it today, on CD’s, in films, in all kinds of ways we could never have anticipated. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt them that through the mysteries of bookkeeping, I still owe them zillions of dollars for promotional costs…)

So notwithstanding Lloyd’s of London, the sixties model was that a company would build your career, and you’d stay with that company for decades, perhaps for life. Streisand, Dylan, Springsteen have all done that. Artists felt like they had a home in their record companies, for better or worse. Songwriters felt the same way about their publishers. We all went to the mat for one another.

Cometh the age of demographics and focus groups. Cometh the ’70’s, when we were suddenly, like pastics, a “growth industry”. Lawyers moved in, musicians moved out.

At the same time, three other important events occurred:

1. The rise of media coverage. In the 60’s there was very little national coverage available for performers. There were “fanzines” – Teen Beat, Sixteen Magazine. Niche audiences, mostly teenage girls. (Teen Beat had a rule that there had to be five male singers featured for every female. Radio had the same unwritten rule; play five male singles for every female. In fact, there were commonly used phrases to describe successful shows that clearly recognized the huge influence of the adolescent female buying public; the phrase “there wasn’t a dry seat in the house” was one of the more disgusting.)

The only other options for press were four national magazines – Time, Newsweek, Life and Look – or local newspapers, and none were fond of us. It took Robert Shelton, music critic for the New York Times, two years to convince the Times to run an article profiling pop music’s effect on our culture. After all, modern music was just a phase, nothing that would be around longterm – not like classical music, or show tunes – not like real music.

As far as television coverage went, there wasn’t any. To get on the Tonight Show or Ed Sullivan was a coup of astounding proportions, one that literally made careers. There were a few daytime television shows – Mike Douglas and the like – but nothing like what we have now. After all, there were only seven television channels in the entire country back then.

In the seventies, suddenly, we were all over the media. People magazine stunned the publishing world with its success, and a host of imitators followed closely on its heels. And they neded us, needed entertainers to prop up their pages.

Out of the blue, there were suddenly half a dozen television shows featuring music. No more sliding us in between the puppet show and the dancing seals – we were actually in people’s living rooms, day in and day out. And sales grew dramatically as a result, and exposure fed the sales, and the sales fed the exposure.

So the sudden rise in popular media outlets was one major event.

2. The rise of cocaine, and I’m not talking about its use among artists. Artists had been dabbling with coke since the ’50’s. I remember trying it with Jimi Hendrix back in 1968. But it made your nose bleed, and everyone said Sam and Dave had lost all their cartilage and couldn’t sing any more, so many of us avoided it. For executives, though, it was another matter. Already fed by delusions of grandeur, coke became a staple of the New York/LA executive suite. You have only to look at Walter Yetnikoff’s ravings at various other record company heads when he was head of CBS Records to see the coke at work. The leaders of our industry were, by that time, a far cry from gentlemen like Goddard Lieberson.

3. And that’s the third big thing that changed. Our new leaders of industry had no real interest in serving the music community, or in fact any community. Oh sure, they sat on the occasional charity committee. They donated their company’s money to good causes. But can you imagine one of them going to his board of directors, as Goddard did, and saying “I know this deal I just made with Russia’s Melodiya Records for their classical catalogue won’t earn us a dime. In fact, it’ll cost us a lot. And I know it means nothing that the licensing deal is double-sided, since they won’t ever pay us any of the royalties they collect. But we have to do this, because it’s important to our culture that this music be made available to the public at large.” Can you imagine feeling that your company had a responsibility to the furtherance of arts and culture – and being willing to pay for it?

No… instead of gentlemen like Goddard and Ahmet Ertegun, we were invaded by a host of smart-ass, fast talking Harvard business graduates – lawyers to the core – whose sole purpose was increased sales, increased bonuses, and finding potential buyers for their companies. It didn’t matter if those buyers would be absentee landlords, as unfamiliar with American culture and ideals as a Portuguese sardine. It didn’t matter that in the corporate shuffles, hundreds and thousands of loyal, long-term employees would suddenly find themselves out on the street, desperately looking for work. These people had no personal, emotional investment in the music business. All that mattered was power, and the acquisition of more power. It was an appalling degeneration.

There’s no doubt that the late ’70’s to the late ’80’s were a period for us best defined as “wretched excess”. We were selling bazillions of records, tying them in to films, stage shows, commercials, whatever we could get our hands on. Worldwide industry sales were ridiculously high; we were becoming General Motors. I remember Walter Yetnikoff, at the height of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, explaining the new business protocol to me: no longer would it suffice to have one or two singles on the record. No longer would record companies assume that an artist’s first albums were part of the learning process, the career-building process. Artists would need to have a minimum of five singles on the first record, and they’d get only get one shot.

Five singles? Just how many hit songwriters are there out there? Artists and producers spend years looking for a “career single”, that one elusive track that makes your name a household word. Five on one album, under contracts that required a new album every nine months? I made six albums in six years at CBS, each of them self-written, self-arranged. And I was expected to tour for at least nine months behind each of them.

The eighties brought us more of the same, and the key word here is “more”. Fed by ballooning sales figures and massive cocaine use, the upper reaches of our industry lost their minds. We were blinded by dollars, convinced everything would go on as it had been, blissfully raking in the gold while completely ignoring the generations coming up after us – generations that had no experience in the field. Generations that didn’t remember what it was like in 1967, when the head of NARAS said to me “Gee, if we could just get some television and radio to cover the Grammys”. Generations without mentors, left to blindly flail their way up the corporate ladder – without any sense of history, without any sense of morality, and certainly without any grounding in ethics.

Our industry has been so busy writing history that we’ve forgotten to live history, and to instill a sense of it in the young people joining our profession.

How many of you knew that the first million selling record in this country was Bessie Smith’s Down Hearted Blues, released in 1923 and selling an astonishing two million copies in the next year? And that, during a time when records by black artists were called “race records”, and sold under the counter. How many of you realize that when Charlie Pride came to Nashville to record, Chet Atkins made a point of appearing in as many photos as possible with him, an arm around the young mans’ shoulders, to show he welcomed Charlie to the community? How many of you know that the music industry has, since its inception, been a leader in the fight for racial equality? That’s part of what we brought to this culture – the mixing of black and white artists, on stage, in photographs, on album covers, at a time when blacks and whites just did not mix. We can be proud of that. We should be proud of that.

But these past two decades have seen a rise in self-serving do-good work, and a miserable decline in our self-awareness.

Why? I believe in part it’s due to a general lowering of standards in our culture, a culture that we in large part define.

They say manners are morals. We practice good manners, as I explained to my nephews once, not for ourselves, but for those around us. We don’t spit in the street; it might be contagious to others. We ask “How are you?” to show that we’re interested, that we care. Our manners separate us from the animals; they show that we are a civilized people.

But you cannot have civilization without conscience. You cannot have a civilized society without a sense of family, family that takes care of its own. And how abysmally do we practice that? What company offers its artists or writers health benefits, or the option to buy in to insurance plans? What business models do we practice to ensure the loyalty of employees and co-workers? Is it ethical, or just, that songwriters have no union to speak for them, that there’s no recognized alliance between songwriters and performers? Is it right that Sony considers its artists, to quote one executive, “just software”, as disposable as a CD jewel case? The ramifications of this lack of family modality reach much further into our business than you’d imagine.

Surely, by the time you enter the business world, your ethical path is already laid out? You either have them, or you don’t, right? Ethics are imbued at your parent’s knees. A good man doesn’t steal. A good woman doesn’t prostitute herself. One would think that people entering the music industry would already have a sense of their own ethics – or lack thereof. And yet…

We now face several generations of youg people whose parents believed value systems could be imparted during “quality time” with their children. Let me tell you, that phrase “quality time” was invented by some yuppie who just wanted an excuse to spend more time at the office. Ethics, like morals, are rooted in the family, and we are living in a time when families are fragmented. As business people, we’re faced with incoming employees who have no idea of the basic rights and wrongs inherent to any job position.

Ethics are rooted in family; when we grow up and move into the workforce, to a great extent our co-workers beome our second family. The managers and executives above us assume the parental roles of dictating what is, and is not, acceptable.

Ethics is a team sport. It’s not enough for the head of a company to appear once a year during a convention and talk to the troops. It’s not enough for executives to throw a barbecue every 4th of July and invite the grunts. In order to establish an ethical standard, management has to interact with those below it, and show, by example and explanation, what standards the company is held to. This doesn’t only apply to executive management; it applies to the head of any business, no matter how small. If you’re a performing artist, your ethical stance will filter down to, and be adopted by, your band, your management, your crew.

We shouldn’t need to teach those ethics in articles! We should be teaching them every moment of every day, from the mailroom up – by mentoring, by setting an example, by doing the right thing.

When we say of someone “He did the right thing”, there is a hidden subtext. He did the right thing, even though it cost him. People who do the right thing, do it without regard to price. They do the right thing because it is the honorable thing to do. They make the just, the moral choice. And it costs. Conscience costs. Morals cost. Supporting a community, to the detriment of your bottom line,costs. Earning the respect and support of your community costs.

Everything has its price. The only question is, are we willing to pay it?

So let’s look at cost. What does it cost Nashville, when foreigners like myself move here in droves, and there’s no longer a community of songwriters, publishers, record labels to encourage us to learn the history of this place? What does it cost Nashville to support Clear Channel, and the death of regional radio? What’s the price of a Hard Rock Café in every downtown?

What does it cost us, to be like everyone else in the world, instead of being clearly and defineably Nashville? To become a pale imitation of ourselves? Sure, cross-over is a wonderful thing, but it’s all too easy to lose your singularity that way. And as any long-term observer will tell you, the artists – and the companies – that last, are the ones that take the risks. The ones that don’t look or behave like everyone else.

WSM Radio hangs by a string, with yearly debates on a format change. There is nowhere in Nashville to hear a steady diet of historically great country music full-time, and that’s a crime. Music Row has changed from a few blocks of houses with front porches and open doors, to grandiose, ugly buildings that hug the sky and little else. The songwriting community has begun to sound like Los Angeles, focused not on songs, not even on covers, but on dollars. Period.

The death of regionality we feel in this country overall is helped tremendously by the death of family-owned businesses. For every Barnes & Noble, there are a dozen local bookstores out of business. Ditto Tower. Ditto every small business we, as an industry, have failed to support, in our rabid search for bigger, better… and more. More for us.

Less for the consumer? too bad. Less for the artist? too bad. Less for the employees? too bad. More for the stockholders, who feed our bonuses. More for the trades, who feed our egos. More.

When is it enough? What would it cost us to come back to reality? To live in a world where 100,000 in sales is not only respectable, but the sign of a job well done? To convince the community at large that we’re not out to screw them, but that we want to work with them, and for them?

Enough… And yet, in this world, there is never enough. I was at Columbia Records when Michael Jackson broke all sales recores – and it was not enough. The next record had to do better. Sales had to be higher.

Nothing wrong with that. Sales drive the industry. But what, at its root, is our industry selling?

We are a service industry, like it or not. We serve the public, as surely as every waitress, gas station attendant, politician does. Oh, we don’t like it – why would we? We’re special. We are in The Arts.

Nonsense. To quote P T Barnum, There’s a sucker born every minute. And to quote our current business model, There’s a sucker born every minute. I only hope I get to him first.

That’s the perception we’ve left on the street. That’s the perception we have of ourselves. That we’re out there to grab what we can, and devil take the hindmost.

What’s it going to take, to reverse this dismal picture of ourselves as crooks and thieves, uncaring charlatans who spend their time grubbing money and handing out payoffs? To reach a point where the community at large considers us honorable, and worthy of respect?

* A sense of community, and our effect on that community, imbued in our employees from the tape op and mailroom level up. When I first moved to Nashville and began co-writing, I worked with Don Schlitz. One day I came in with a great idea for a cheating song. Don listened, agreed it was a great idea, then said quite seriously that a bunch of the male writers in town had been listening to their wives complain about the plethora of cheating songs on the radio, and they’d decided those songs just weren’t real good for the community. So they weren’t writing them, or pitching them, and they’d appreciate my doing the same. That’s a sense of responsibility, on the ground level.

* A sense of commitment. Commitment to our business, commitment to one another within that business, and commitment to the audience we serve.

* Slowing down. During the last Academy Awards, Pedro Almovar said “I know that to breathe, tonight, is very expensive.” And yet, we must breathe, because breath is the light of knowledge over ignorance. We must be given room to breathe. From the mailroom to the executive suite, we must be able to breathe. And if that takes dealing with the financial realities of standardized maternity leave, or better working conditions, we have to deal with that.

* A return to courtesy, and imbuing that ideal in each and every one of our employees and students. Because courtesy is not just a matter of politeness. It is a way of life.

* A return to responsibility, not just for our own behavior, but for that of our companies and our employees. Because quite often, it’s not a question of “doing the right thing”. Rather, it’s a question of reverse ethics – of not doing the wrong thing. Once people know what is considered wrong, they can stop doing it – if we lead the way.

* Soul-searching, and doing something about it. How many of us have noticed that there’s still not a single female head of a major music company, even though women comprise half the work force? How many of you know that it’s much more difficult to pitch songs if you’re a female songwriter – particularly if you don’t play golf or go bass fishing? How many of us realize the immense amount of gay people in our industry who won’t come out for fear of losing their contracts and their audience? How many of our female songwriters still deliberately dress down when going for a writing appointment, because they don’t want their gender to interfere – or to be put in a position where their gender is laid on the table as partial payment for the chance to work with someone in a better position than they are? It wasn’t so long ago that it was routine for powerful producers to abuse their positions and trade sex for cuts, or contracts.

We can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to people who abuse their status in our industry. The industry is too big, too visible, for that.

* Most of all, a clear concept of what it is we do. What it is we sell. What is at the root of what we are.

It’s not the latest technological breakthrough that drives our success. It’s not the promotion and marketing. It’s not even the sales.

It’s the dreams.

We don’t sell records. We sell dreams. And the most important thing for us to remember, through this entire discussion, is that to be allowed into someone’s living room, someone’s bedroom, someone’s life, is an immense privilege. It is an enormous leap of faith on the listener’s part. It is so very much bigger than we ourselves can ever be.

No one remembers their first kiss by the car they were in – they remember the song that was playing on the radio. No teenager finds solace in the plastics industry – but they find it in the records we put out. We are there for them from cradle to grave, rocking their children to sleep when they’re young, and singing their souls to peace when they leave this earth.

We deal in dreams. And hope. And desire. And the utter magnificense of the human spirit.

Our industry gives voice to the voiceless, who throng to purchase our goods because we give them back a part of themselves they’d forgotten. We provide succor, and sustenance, and a memory of better times gone by – and better times to come.

So let us not forget the grand, and noble, role we play in human culture.

Let us base our own ethics – our standards – our way of life – not on the base metal we earn, or the acquisition of transitory power. Let us base it on the inherent nobility of what we do, and what we provide, for those who cannot provide it for themselves.

============================================

© Rude Girl Publishing™, All Rights Reserved

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2004 at 1:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 3289 times